1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to application servers co-resident on a computer system and, more particularly, to tracking and preventing harmful effects from particular combinations of application programs.
2. Description of the Related Art
When attempting to upgrade a system, understanding how co-resident applications interact with one another is important to understanding the overall system resource requirements. One approach for determining the ability of different applications to co-reside with one another rely on a systems integrator evaluating a large number of possible combinations of software applications that may be deployed on the computing device to determine which combinations allow the computing device to function as desired. Testing in this manner may be acceptable when there are only a few applications but, as independent software vendor (ISV) and partner applications are added, the number of application combinations grows exponentially. It becomes impractical to test all of the combinations and, even if it were practical to test all combinations of existing applications, it still remains impractical to constantly test all possible new combinations each time a new application needs to be installed on the computing device (or an existing application is patched).
Another approach to whether a collection of applications may run on a particular computing device is to rely on the system requirements of third parties (ISVs and partners) and use those to estimate workloads on the computing device. This method, however, does not reveal whether two applications designed by different ISVs may have adverse effects on each other. Further, relying only on a stand-alone profile of each application (and combining applications based on their profile requirements) may not reveal negative interaction consequences as well as overstate system requirements. For instance, application A may require 2 GB of memory and application B may require 1 GB of memory, but together they may both be able to operate with 2.5 GB of memory. Combining the requirements also puts integrators at the mercy of the ISVs supplying the applications because an integrator may only be as accurate as the ISV's determination of the application's requirements.